Cisco Positioned as A Leader in the Gartner Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant – For a 2nd Time in a Row!

Gartner has released their 2013 Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure Magic Quadrant. For the 2nd time in a row, Cisco is recognized as a leader in this highly anticipated publication.

Without further ado, here is the 2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Infrastructure (Authors: Tim Zimmerman and Mark Fabbi; Published 3rd September 2013).

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There are two primary criteria for the Gartner MQ – (a) the Completeness of Vision (b) Ability to Execute.

From a vision perspective, Cisco unveiled its vision of Unified Access – One Policy, One Management, One Network – more than a year back (last June, to be precise). This vision was the first step in helping our customers drive business innovations and achieving IT simplicity while addressing the rapid growth of BYOD and Mobility in their organizations.

We were also ahead of the times by having a vision for the network to be a strategic asset (and not a cost center) for our customers. And the way to make this happen was to leverage the network intelligence to drive new customer experiences and revenue opportunities. That’s where our vision of Connected Mobile Experiences (CMX) came about. The idea behind CMX was to enable organizations to improve customer loyalty and increase revenue by delivering context-aware mobile information that matches their customers’ real-time needs and preferences. A retail store, for example, can use the CMX solution to enhance mobile shopping experience, increase loyalty app usage, create targeted personalized marketing and context-rich notifications, and use on-premise visibility to understand and adapt to customer behavior. Its no surprise that the majority of our customers have jointly embraced this Cisco vision and a lot of our competitors are now trying to follow suit.

But the proof is in the pudding.. i.e How has Cisco executed on this vision? Cisco followed the Unified Access vision with the swift delivery of One Policy and One Management solution components at Interop New York in October 2012. The solution was powered by Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) for One Policy and Cisco Prime Infrastructure for One Management. At Cisco Live London in Jan 2013, we then unveiled the One Network solution – with our Catalyst 3850 switch that truly converged the wired and wireless infrastructure into one by integrating the WLAN controller into the switch at the ASIC level.

While doing all these, we believe we still maintained our industry leadership by being in the forefront of Wi-Fi standards like 802.11ac and unveiling the industry’s first 802.11ac enabled Access Point – the 3600 AP with 802.11ac radio module – providing not just enterprise-class reliability and wired-network-like performance but also delivering investment protection.

In November 2012, we unveiled our CMX solution – a unique way to enable personalized mobile experiences and location analytics for new business services by leveraging the Wi-Fi network intelligence. This made the network relevant to the Lines of Businesses (LoB) and gave the IT department of organizations new ways to generating revenue and providing new end consumer services. CMX transformed the wireless network into an intelligent business platform enabling analysis of device and people movement, and in-venue interactions through mobile apps, browsers, and social media for employees and customers.

Lastly, to address the midmarket and lean IT organizations, Cisco expanded its solution portfolio and acquired Meraki – a 100% cloud-managed networking solution.

We are excited to be recognized as a leader again by Gartner in the wired and wireless infrastructure market space. We will continue to innovate in the Unified Access space, ramp up our CMX solution while building a strong ecosystem partnership to deliver this solution across a wide variety of verticals.

Share with us what you’re doing in to make your policy, management and network all work better together and how you are working with LoB to use the network to drive new customer experiences and revenue opportunities!

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